Umbrella Summer (3 page)

I read the big green book for almost two hours,
lying on my back on the floor with my feet up on my bed. There was some real good stuff in there, all about scarlet fever and lactose intolerance, and how you should check your carbon monoxide detectors every week to make sure they were working. I stuck slips of paper between the pages to mark all the important stuff, which was pretty much everything. But some of the words were too long and confusing for me, and anyway after a while my eyeballs started to get fuzzy. When I looked that up, it turned out it was a
sign of diabetes. I figured I should stop reading so they wouldn't get any fuzzier.

I decided to go over to Rebecca's to tell her about the haunted house, like I'd told Mrs. Harper I would. And maybe while I was there, Rebecca's dad would let me borrow a dictionary so I could understand the book better. We used to have a dictionary at our house, a nice good fat one, but Jared had lost it about a year ago when he'd taken it to school for a language arts project and left it on the bus afterward.

Rebecca lived only twelve houses away from me, on the other side of the street. If you squinted real hard from my living-room window, you could see Rebecca's mom when she was watering the lawn. As soon as I got there, I took off all my gear and stacked it next to my bike in the far corner of Rebecca's driveway, where it wouldn't be in the way of cars and cause an accident, and then I rang the doorbell. Rebecca's dad answered.

“Hi there, Annie!” he said. Dr. Young always sounded happy to see me. “How are you feeling today?”

“I'm okay,” I said. “Except I think I might have African sleeping sickness.”

His eyebrows squinched close together when I said that, bunched up in the middle confused. “It's unlikely,” he told me. He put his hand on my forehead. “But I can take your temperature if it'd make you feel better.”

“Thanks.”

I walked through the house to the kitchen and sat myself on a stool at the counter.

“Here we go,” Dr. Young told me, once he'd fished the thermometer out of the drawer. He gave it to me, and I wedged it solid under my tongue.

You weren't supposed to chitchat while you were waiting for a thermometer to beep, so while Dr. Young started up a pot of coffee, I checked the word wall to see if there was anything new.

Even though Rebecca's dad was a doctor, I always thought he should have been a book writer instead, because he was just crazy for words. He had stacks and stacks of books all over the house, even in the bathroom. And when he found a word he liked—one he
said struck his fancy because it sounded silly or had a peculiar meaning—he'd grab a piece of chalk and write the word in big doctor-squiggly letters on the giant chalkboard on the far wall in the kitchen. Sometimes if he couldn't find any chalk, he'd rip the page right out of his book and circle the words he liked, and then tape it up there. The whole chalkboard was covered in words, every sort of one you could think of—
homily, emaciate, herbivore, tonsillectomy, waterfall, egg drop soup, wisp, Francophile, jurisdiction.
I had no idea what most of the words meant, and neither did Rebecca, but we liked to stare at the wall and try to figure it out. Dr. Young was always saying how we should play with words, so I never was sure why it made him laugh so hard the time he found us acting out “Goldilocks and the Three Proboscises.”

My thermometer beeped just as the coffee started hissing into the pot. Dr. Young showed me the temperature. “Ninety-eight point six,” he said. “Perfect.”

“So I don't have African sleeping sickness?”

“Nope.” He shook the thermometer. “Where did
you hear about a thing like that, anyway?”

“From a book,” I said. Which reminded me of the thing I wanted to ask him. “Hey, Dr. Young? Do you have a dictionary I could borrow? This new book I'm reading has millions of long words in it I don't know, so I want to look them up.”

“Good for you, Annie,” he said, and he smiled big. “Which one would you like?
Webster's, Oxford English, Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
? I have dozens.”

I thought about that. “Just a real fat one, I think. The fattest one you have.”

“I know exactly the one then,” he said. “Actually, it's right”—he reached up above his head and opened a cupboard, where there were tons of cookbooks and phone books and pieces of paper mashed all together—“here. There you go. You think you can carry that home without any mishaps?”

It really was big, the hugest dictionary I'd ever seen, and it must've weighed more than three watermelons. “Yep,” I said. “My bike has a basket. Thanks.”

“Sure thing. So what's this book you're reading?”

“
The Everyday Guide to Preventing Illness
,” I told him. “It has lots of good stuff in there. So I don't get sick and die.”

I thought Dr. Young would be proud of me for trying to be a good disease catcher, like he was. But when I looked up at him, he was frowning into his mug of coffee while he stirred it slowly with a spoon. “Annie,” he said after a while, “do you know what
despondent
means?”

I shook my head.

“Well, then.” He rummaged around in a drawer until he found a piece of chalk, and then he wrote the word
despondent
on the word wall in big squiggly letters. Chalk dust fell to the ground as he crossed the
t
. He didn't tell me what it meant. I think he wanted me to look it up in the dictionary. But I could tell by the dead-brother look he was giving me as he set the chalk on the counter that I didn't want to.

“Why don't we go find Rebecca?” he said after a little bit. “I think she's in the backyard with her mom.”

I didn't answer at first, just studied the black-and-
white tiles on the kitchen floor. One of them was chipped, which I'd never noticed before. “Dr. Young?” I said.

“Yes?” He picked up his coffee mug, his chalky fingers leaving marks on the handle.

“If you'd been at the hospital that day, instead of that other doctor, I mean…” I smoothed my hands over my legs. My palms were sweatier than normal. I was going to have to check that one in the big green book when I got home to see if it was a symptom of any bad diseases. “Do you think you would've figured out about Jared's heart?” I asked. “Do you think you could've fixed him?”

“Oh, Annie,” Dr. Young said, and he set his mug back on the counter even though he hadn't taken any sips. “I must have asked myself that very same question at least a hundred times.”

But he didn't tell me the answer, just stood there scratching his cheek.

“Yeah?” I said.

He took a deep breath, like he needed lots of air
to help push out the words he was going to say. “I know the doctor who saw your brother that day. Dr. Amundsen. She's a good friend of mine, actually, and an excellent doctor. Annie, what your brother had, an aortic dissection, it's extremely uncommon, especially in someone his age. And if Dr. Amundsen didn't figure it out, I don't know that anyone could have.”

“Oh,” I said. I wasn't sure if that made me feel better or worse. “But—”

“The most important thing, however,” Dr. Young said, “is that
you
are healthy.” He picked up his coffee again and took a long sip, but his eyes were on me the whole time. “You know that, right, Annie?” he said after he was done swallowing his coffee sip. “You're not going to get what Jared had. You're perfectly healthy, inside and out.”

I squeezed the dictionary closer to my chest. “Mmm,” I said.

Dr. Young looked like he was going to say something else then, but before he got a chance, Rebecca came into the kitchen.

“Hi, Annie!” she said when she saw me. Her two blond braids were falling down her back, same as always, and she was carrying her hamster's cage, with all its neon pink and yellow crawling tubes sticking out everywhere. “I didn't even know you were here.”

“Yep.” I pointed to the hamster cage in her arms. “What are you doing with Fuzzby?”

“Mom said I have to clean his cage because he's looking
peaked
.”

“Ooh!” Dr. Young said. “
Peaked
! Fabulous word.” And he scribbled it on the wall.

I peered inside Fuzzby's cage. “He's sleeping,” I said. Fuzzby was always sleeping. He hardly ever did anything except every once in a while he'd
squeak-squeak-squeak
in his hamster wheel, and that was only when me and Rebecca were having sleepovers and were finally at the sleeping part.

“Yeah,” Rebecca said. “Except normally he sleeps up top and now he's right next to his food dish.”

“Maybe he has seasonal affective disorder,” I told her. I'd read about that one that morning. “You can get
it in the winter and it makes you real tired and sad.”

Rebecca frowned. “But it's the summer,” she said. “And he's a hamster.”

“Let me take a look,” Dr. Young said. He opened up the top part of the cage and scooped Fuzzby out with one hand. Fuzzby blinked his eyes open sleepy sleepy. He didn't look too happy about being woken up.

While Dr. Young examined Fuzzby, Rebecca took apart all the parts of the hamster cage and dumped out the wood chips at the bottom and then filled the sink with soapy water to dunk the hamster tubes in. I hated when Rebecca had to clean Fuzzby's cage, because it took forever and it smelled disgusting, sick-sweet like fruit punch that spilled in the carpet a million years ago. But I decided I should be a good friend and help anyway. So I dug out the yellow rubber gloves from under the sink and gave one pair to Rebecca and put one pair on my own hands, and we got to cleaning.

“Well?” Rebecca asked her dad while she scrubbed a tiny hamster poop off the squeak wheel. “Is he okay?”

“I think he's fine,” Dr. Young said. “But I'm no
hamster expert. His breathing might be a little more shallow than normal. If he's still looking lethargic tomorrow, we'll take him to the vet, okay?”

“Okay,” Rebecca said.

Dr. Young put Fuzzby in a giant mixing bowl on the counter and picked up his mug again. “I'm going to go find your mother,” he said to Rebecca. “Annie, good luck with that book of yours.”

I looked up from my suds. “Thanks,” I said.

I thought he was going to leave the kitchen right then, but he didn't. Instead he took a sip of his coffee, nodded his head at me, and said, “Not all words are helpful, you know.” Which I thought was pretty weird.

“So guess what,” I told Rebecca once Dr. Young had left the kitchen with his coffee.

“What?”

“Someone's moving into the haunted house.”

“Really?” As soon as I said “haunted house,” Rebecca's eyes got big as Ping-Pong balls. “Is it a ghost?”

“Nah. It's just an old lady. She doesn't have a pit
bull.” I rinsed off the last neon pink tube. “I think she's moving in tomorrow.”

“Man!” Rebecca said, taking her gloves off to start on the drying part. “How are we ever going to sneak into the yard to see inside if someone
lives
there?”

Rebecca started thinking. I could tell that was what she was doing, because whenever Rebecca thought real hard, she chewed on the end of one of her braids. Her mom always braided her hair in two long pieces, every single day. Rebecca had real pretty hair, twice as long as mine and the exact same color as the split in the top of her mom's loaf of fresh-baked bread. I know because we checked it. We tried to figure out what color my hair was once and it turned out it was the same as the dirt at the very bottom of Mr. L.'s compost pile. Which in my opinion was not nearly as nice a color as bread.

Rebecca pulled her braid out of her mouth and said, “We've got to find a way to get in there and see the ghosts.”

“I guess.”

“But now if we break in, we'll get caught for sure,
with that old lady and everything.”

I rubbed the bottom part of Fuzzby's cage with a dish towel. I didn't care so much about getting inside the haunted house, but I could tell Rebecca thought it'd be better than Disneyland in there. “Well, what if we didn't break in?” I said. “What if we just”—an idea was starting to tingle at the sides of my brain—“visited?”

Rebecca chewed some more, and then said, “But what would we visit her for? She's an old lady.”

“Well, maybe we could bring her something. Like a present. And then when she was opening it, we'd sneak inside and find all the ghosts.”

“Yeah,” Rebecca said, and she was grinning now. “Yeah. And you know what we could bring her? A casserole.”

“A casserole?”

“That's what Mrs. Harper brought us when we moved here.”

“But I don't know how to make casserole.”

“Me neither.” Rebecca frowned.

I tried to think some more while we dried, and
Rebecca chewed faster than ever. But by the time we'd finished with Fuzzby's cage, and all the tubes were clicked back into place, and we'd put a fresh layer of wood chips at the bottom and new food in the food bowl and water in the water bottle, we still hadn't thought of anything. Rebecca stuck Fuzzby back inside and shrugged her shoulders at me.

“You wanna ride bikes?” she asked. “We could do turtle tracks if you want. Maybe that'll give us some good ideas.”

“Sure,” I said. Turtle tracks was the game I made up three months ago, where you rode your bike as slow as possible without coming to a stop. It was the opposite of racing. Whoever took the longest to get to the finish line was the winner. So far the record was five minutes to get from Mrs. Harper's petunia bed to my mailbox. We used to ride races all the time, and I could tell Rebecca liked that more, but I didn't think racing was such a good idea. Because even with a helmet on, if you got going too fast, you could crash into a tree and get paralyzed. I read about it in the newspaper.